Well, I suppose in the end, language, like history, is made by human beings. And human beings are so hopelessly different and disorganized, they can never quite agree on anything. They’re only human, after all. (Sigh.)
Still, maybe there’s something special about having these crazy plurals, and even crazier spellings. I sometimes think English is like a big old wall that people have been scribbling on for centuries. How sad it would be if someone came along and just sloshed a huge can of paint over the top of it, and everything disappeared and all we had left was a nice, clean wall . . .
Hooray for Anglo-Saxon!
English is a language with a lot of different words—actually hundreds of thousands of them. If you ever look in a dictionary that tells you where a word originally comes from (this is called etymology), you will see that English words come from many different languages—French, Latin, Norse, Dutch, Greek, Hindi, Arabic, Yiddish, Japanese—and more.
But the first English words came from the German language called Anglo-Saxon—otherwise known as Old English. We owe a lot to those Anglo-Saxons. The days of the week, for example. Sunday, Monday, and Saturday are named after the sun, moon, and Saturn, but the other days take their names from Anglo-Saxon gods. So Tuesday is “Tiw’s day” (god of battle); Wednesday is “Woden’s day” (god of war); Thursday is “Thor’s day” (god of thunder); and Friday is “Frigg’s day” (goddess of love).
And even though there are now hundreds of thousands of other words in English, most of our common everyday words still come from Anglo-Saxon. Beautiful strong, short, simple words, like: sun, moon, land, friend, hope, snow, shame, smile, groan, love, live, wife, house, child, man, fight.
Don’t be fooled, though. If we Word Snoops went back in time, we wouldn’t be able to understand very much of what anyone was saying in those days. Anglo-Saxon was just too different to what we now speak, especially in how it sounded and was spelled. But if you’re really interested, you can still learn Anglo-Saxon at college one day. (See you there!)
Hey, just for fun, have a look at the list on the opposite page and see if you can write a sentence that only uses Anglo-Saxon words. Here’s a little Anglo-Saxon rhyme the Word Snoop just made up to give you an idea.
My brother eats cold cheese at night
And butter in the morning light.
(Mmm, yum!)
Some Anglo-Saxon words used in Modern English
a, and, at
after
all
bed
before
brother
butter
by
cheese
child
cold
day
drink
earth
eat
egg
father
fear
fight
fire
friend
go
good
hill
his, him, her
home
honey
hope
house
in, on, over
land
light
lightning
live, love
man
meat
midnight
milk
moon
morning
mother
my, me
name
night
noon
rain
sea
shirt
shoe
sister
smile
snow
sock
sorrow
spring
star
summer
sun
the, then, there
thunder
to
up
water
why
winter
with
Shakespeare and the Bible
Nowadays there are over a billion people in the world who speak English, but back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Britain there were only around five million. Yet from that small number came some of the greatest writers in the English language.
One was the playwright and actor William Shakespeare, who lived from 1564 to 1616. He wrote hundreds of poems and nearly forty plays, among them some of the most famous plays ever written—Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream—the list goes on. Even if you’ve never seen or read any of Shakespeare’s plays, I bet you’ll know some of the lines he wrote, because they are quoted everywhere—lines like “parting is such sweet sorrow”; “to be or not to be, that is the question”; “the game is up” and “good riddance!” (Ring any bells?)
Because Modern English was such a quickly growing language when Shakespeare was alive, there are also hundreds of totally new words that were published for the first time in his plays. Words like bedazzle, unearthly, madcap, bloodstained, watchdog—and that’s just a few of them. Some people think that Shakespeare may have invented these words himself—or it may be that he was just the first to write down words he heard people using around him. Whatever the case, Shakespeare’s passion for English and his dazzling ability to turn words into rich, unforgettable stories and characters has made him the most loved writer in the history of the language. His work is read over and over again, and has become part of all our lives, whether we know it or not.
The other writers from that early time who had a huge impact on how we speak and write English today were actually translators—people who change one language into another. How could they be so important? Well, it’s because what they translated was the Bible.
The Bible, of course, was not originally in English, but in the ancient languages of Hebrew and Greek. As Christianity spread, the monks translated it into Latin, the language used in schools and universities. But then the idea began that it should be translated into English so that ordinary people (who didn’t happen to know Hebrew or Greek or Latin) would be able to understand it.
Well, that probably sounds like a good plan to you, but many church leaders were against it. They thought that only educated people could truly understand the Bible, so it should stay in Latin or its original languages. In the sixteenth century, anyone who tried to translate the Bible into English could be arrested. The most gifted of these translators was a man called William Tyndale. He was arrested, put in prison, and even executed in 1536. (Amazingly, he was so committed to his work he asked if he could have his Hebrew Bible, dictionary, and grammar book in prison so he could keep on translating!)
As time passed, luckily the church leaders changed their minds and decided it wasn’t such a bad idea to have the Bible in English. So people were allowed to translate it without getting executed, and quite a few English Bibles were published. A few too many, really, as some of them were not very good. People were getting confused with so many different versions around. Finally, in 1611, during the reign of King James I, it was decided to get all the translations together and pick the best bits to make one extra-special official Bible that could be put in every church in the country. Known as the King James Bible, this became the regular Bible used by English speakers for at least the next 300 years.
The King James Bible is largely based on the translation of William Tyndale, who transformed the ancient foreign languages into dignified, astonishing, mysterious English. Like Shakespeare, the King James Bible has been so loved, and read so many times over and over again, that thousands of its strange and beautiful phrases have become part of how we speak, think, and write. Here are just a few of the hundreds of expressions that have come to us in English via Hebrew and Greek from the King James Bible.
As old as the hills
By the skin of your teeth
A drop in the bucket
At your wits’ end
From strength to strength
Let there be light
The salt of the earth
Bite the dust
Hello, dear Word Snoops. Did you figure out the secret message in the last chapter? Below is the next part, but of course you have to decipher the special code first. See how you do . . . (Hint: I wonder if any pesky silent letters have snuck into these words.)
FIGNAGLLGY MALNALGELD TOK
Dear Snoops,
CANYOUREADTHISSENTENCE
Can you? There, I knew you could! It
looks odd, though, doesn’t it, without any
punctuation. You know—periods, commas,
question marks, quotation marks,
that sort of thing.
But did you know that at one time there was
no punctuation? Not only that, there were no
spaces between words. And you didn’t have
to start your sentence with a capital, because
ALL the letters were capitals.
SOHOWDIDANYONEMANAGETOREADANYTHING
You’re about to find out . . .
Must dash—I see a comma coming,
and an exclamation mark!
The Word Snoop
3.
Dots and dashes, interrobangs and cat’s claws
Punctuation
When punctuation began, it was mainly to help people read out loud. Until a few hundred years ago, not many people were taught to read, so there was a lot more reading out loud by the few who could.
To help these out-loud readers in the ancient world, signs known as points were added to pages of writing. This is where the word punctuation comes from—the Latin word punctus,meaning “point.” These points told readers when to pause, when to take a breath, and what to emphasize. They were a bit like all those notation marks in music that show you when to bang the piano really loudly, or when to play very, very slowly.
In Europe from the early centuries AD, these sorts of points were quite widely used, although not everybody used the same points for the same thing (here we go again!). But by the reign of King Charlemagne of France in the late eighth century, there was at least some agreement in Europe about a few of the signs, as well as things like capital and lowercase letters, paragraphs, and spaces between words.
Then, when the printing press was invented in the fifteenth century, printers wanted some firmer guidelines about what to put where, so that everyone was doing the same thing. And now that more and more books were being printed, people started to think of punctuation as something that could help them make sense of what they were reading silently as well as out loud.
Since that time, all sorts of punctuation rules have been discovered, invented, and argued about, and many books have been written on the topic. You would have been taught some of the basic rules having to do with capital letters, periods, apostrophes, and commas at school. But even these rules have sometimes proved hard to pin down . . .
Punctuation: Signs & Symbols
Now you know whypunctuation began—but how come we use those particular signs? And where did they get their names and shapes from? Well, after hours of careful snooping, here’s what I managed to find out . . .
Comma, colon: period.
All three of these types of punctuation were given their Greek names by a friendly librarian named Aristophanes, who lived in Byzantium in the second century BC. They were marks on the page, each with a message to the reader.
Comma , meant a short pause.
Comma is Greek for “cutting off.”
Colon : meant a medium-sized pause.
Colon is Greek for “limb” or a verse of a poem.
Period . meant a long pause—that is, a full stop. Period is Greek for “road going around.”
Question mark ?
In the Middles Ages (from around the fifth to the sixteenth century), a squiggle above a period was sometimes used to show that the sentence was a question and that the person speaking should make their voice go up at the end. By the seventh century, it had turned into what we call a question mark. The curly shape may have come from drawing the letter Q—short for the Latin Quaestio,meaning “question.”
Exclamation mark !
In the early days of punctuation, if you were reading out loud and you saw this sign above a period, you were supposed to make your voice sound amazed or surprised, much like we do today. Some people think the sign began as a squashed-up version of the ancient Greek word IO meaning “Oh gosh!” (or something like that), with the I on top and the O underneath. However it came about, it was well in use by the seventh century. At that time it was sometimes known as the “mark of admiration.” (!)
Interrobang
More punctuation marks are being born all the time—just think of all the little signs you use when you’re texting.
But have you ever seen this?
It’s an interrobang—a punctuation mark invented by Martin K. Speckter in 1962. It’s especially for those moments when you want to use a question mark and an exclamation mark all at once. It could certainly be pretty useful for comic book writers!?!?!?
And have you ever heard of a question-comma or an exclamation-comma?
If you open up one of the books about Selby, the fabulous talking dog, chances are you’ll spot one. These were featured in a book by the Australian author Duncan Ball, for those times when you want to use a question mark or an exclamation mark right in the middle of a sentence. Hey ! why not use one yourself? next time you’re writing a story.
Quotation marks “ ”
Quotation marks are used to show that someone is speaking. The kind we have in English today began to be widely used during the eighteenth century. Before that, readers simply understood from the way a sentence was written that someone was speaking, although sometimes the spoken words were underlined.
Apostrophe ’
In English, the apostrophe is used for two things—to show where a letter or letters are missing (such as don’t,for the missing o from “do not”); or to show who owns something (such as the WordSnoop’s umbrella).
The word apostrophe is Greek. In ancient Greek drama, an apostrophe was when an actor turned away from the audience to address someone who wasn’t there. (Perhaps they were at another play?) Anyway, the word came to be associated with the idea of standing in for something that was missing. So, for example, in Old English the letters es were used to show who owned something. Then the e started to be left out, and the apostrophe was put in to stand for that missing e.
Apostrophes are the punctuation mark that people seem to get most excited about—whether they love them or hate them. The Irish writer George Bernard Shaw didn’t like apostrophes at all, and proudly wrote one of his most successful plays, Pygmalion, using as few as possible. But Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,simply adored apostrophes and put in as many as he possibly could. For example, instead of writing can’t(short for “can not”), he would write ca’n’t. It must have taken him quite a while to write things down sometimes—“Sorry, I sha’n’t come to play today. I ca’n’t quite finish this letter . . .”
These days, you’ll notice that sometimes when filling in a form you’re asked to leave out the apostrophes altogether. This is because they can really confuse data entry systems. Lewis Carroll would be heartbroken!
Punctuation in Other Languages
Is it just me, or does this sentence look a little odd?
<<¿But how much is that doggie in
the window?>> demanded Claudine.
There’s something about it . . . but what?
Aha! It looks strange because it’s using punctuation marks that come from languages other than English.
What? Even the punctuation is different?
That’s right. Like anything to do with language, different groups of people have different ways of doing things. If you go snooping inside the font options on your computer, you’ll discover several unusual kinds of punctuation from other languages that you may not have seen before. In Japanese, for example, the period is a tiny circle that is not filled in o ; while in Hebrew it’s
a little black diamond ◆ . In Chinese, there’s a special tear-shaped comma that you use when you are making a list.
Have a look at the sentence on page 62 again, and let’s see how sharp your snooping skills are. What do you notice? Yes, you got it! There are question marks at both the beginning and end of the question. Not only that, the question mark at the beginning ¿ is upside down. This is what you’d find if you looked at a book printed in Spanish. In an Arabic book, you might see the same question mark as in English, but pointing in the other direction. In a Greek book, there’s a different sign altogether, what we call a semicolon ; .
But what about those other funny signs? << >> They’re the quotation marks. You’ll also find them in languages such as Russian, French, and Finnish.
In some languages, they like their quotation marks so much they even give them nicknames. In Icelandic, they’re called “goose feet”; in Turkish, “fingernail marks”; and in Hungarian, “cat’s claws.”
In English-speaking countries, printers and proofreaders who work with punctuation marks all the time (and get sick of saying the same words over and over again) have already thought of some good nicknames for them:
Question Mark—eh (as in “Eh? What did you say?”)
Exclamation Mark—bang, screamer, gasper, startler
Asterisk—splat
Hmm, what nickname can you think of for a comma? Or a colon?
Punctuation: Do we Need it?
The funny thing about punctuation is that it’s actually not that hard to read without it, once you get used to it. Think of when you and a friend are texting—you hardly use any regular punctuation, but you can still understand each other. And in the Thai language, for example, there are rarely spaces between words and very few punctuation marks, but people keep reading anyway. After all, if you’re not expecting to see something, you don’t go looking for it.
The Word Snoop Page 3